Monolith maker

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Despite a track record in tall building design, Marshall Strabala prizes excellence over height.

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Strabala has designed the 5 Canada Square building in London’s famous Canary Wharf.

Burj Dubai architect Marshall Strabala is a man at the top of his game, having designed three of the world's 10 tallest buildings. He tells Arabian Business why the credit crunch could curb the Gulf's height wars and why for green building, the only way is up.

It is already one of the world's most recognisable structures, one of modern engineering's greatest achievements - and the cause of many a cricked neck among both locals and visitors to Dubai.

Piercing the blue sky of the Arabian Gulf, the Burj Dubai dwarfs even the 30-storey buildings surrounding it and, once finished, will be the tallest tower in the world by some distance.

Developer Emaar Properties has gone to lengths to keep the tower's final height under wraps, shrouding the plans in secrecy. However, according to the man who designed it six years ago - and has since watched his sketches and models transformed into a concrete-and-steel reality - the project has always been driven by one goal.

"The reason for doing the Burj Dubai was to create the world's tallest building and put it off the water in Dubai, which traditionally is not the most popular [stretch of] land here," explains architect Marshall Strabala.

In 2002, Strabala was working as associate partner and lead designer for his then company Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), when it won the competition to design the Burj Dubai. As such, he is able to shed a little light on that most tightly-guarded secret - when he left SOM in 2006 the skyscraper was planned to be 808 metres, or half a mile tall.

"I don't know where it [the Burj Dubai] is with its steel but 808 metres was its design when I left SOM in 2006, which is exactly half a mile tall," says Strabala, who is now based out of Houston as director of design at Gensler, an international architecture, design, planning and consulting firm. "They should be very close to topping it out."

Emaar remains tight-lipped, merely stating that when completed in September 2009 it will hold the world record in all four categories as recognised by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat - namely, highest structure, roof, antenna and occupied floor.

Whatever the final height, Strabala knows more about tall buildings than most, having worked on three of the world's current top 10 during his 23-year career.

Spanning almost every corner of the globe, the American has worked on the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Nanjing Greenland Zifeng Tower in Shanghai's financial centre, Discovery Tower in Texas, 5 Canada Square in London's Canary Wharf and the financial district of King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia, among other illustrious projects.

"The design of the Burj was primarily a residential building," Strabala says of the Downtown Burj Dubai centerpiece. "We changed the top to office very late in the game.

"With a hotel at the bottom, it was primarily super high-end luxury and I think [Emaar chairman] Mohamed Ali Alabbar had a terrific business model for doing it as his whole development is around the Burj... this was an element that marked this part of the city," he explains. "So we have an urban marker that signifies a district in Dubai and creates value for the buildings around it."

With the Burj forming the showpiece of a city within a city, the $20bn Downtown Burj Dubai development will itself include 30,000 homes, nine hotels, 6.2 acres of parkland, 19 residential towers, the Dubai Mall, and a 30-acre man-made lake.

With its distinctive three-legged shape, the plan of the Burj Dubai tower was based on a 72-storey tower SOM worked on called Tower Palace Three in Seoul, South Korea.

"I believe design is an evolution, not a revolution," says Strabala. "You are not coming up with completely independent thoughts every time you do a building, you build on the buildings you've already done before."

Competition for the title of tallest structure is fierce. Since work on the Burj got underway, two equally ambitious skycraper projects have been unveiled which, when completed, would steal the tallest tower crown from the Burj. It is perhaps no surprise that both these projects are in the Gulf, a region with an appetite for super-sized real estate schemes and the bank accounts to support them.

Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Holding unveiled plans in October 2008 to build Kingdom Tower in Jeddah, which it said would be over 1km tall, without being more specific.

Just days earlier, developer Nakheel, a rival in Dubai to Emaar, announced it intended to build its own skyscraper, which at more than 1km tall would dwarf the Burj Dubai.

Yet this is not the first time Strabala has been involved in a project that has designs on featuring the world's tallest building, and so he is philosophical about the next generation of super-structures potentially stealing the limelight from the Burj.

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